


Vocabulary

by More_night



Category: Alien: Covenant, Prometheus (2012)
Genre: F/M, Gen, robots in love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-23
Updated: 2017-05-23
Packaged: 2018-11-03 20:41:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,278
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10974951
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/More_night/pseuds/More_night
Summary: Some androids know that they can feel. Some don't.





	Vocabulary

**Author's Note:**

> Translation in Pyсский by польза [here](https://ficbook.net/readfic/5579098).

1.

 

It takes a long time to regrow skin for David’s neck. The remaining neuroids can synthesize artificial blood from the minerals in source water and the particles in the air, but the less they can intake, the slower the process. The blood collects in a small plate shaped like a seashell, but black like ebony and harder than everything she has ever touched. Once enough skin and neuroids have been produced, the head can be reattached to the torso.

It takes a while as well before Elizabeth can eat food. She eats the emergency rations stored in her suit. Then she eats the lichen that grows on the wall of what seemed to be the kitchen. She throws it up.

The next day, she eats the lichen again. David tells her that it’s likely she will die. She agrees, then she puts the half-cup of blood that was made this week and spreads it on the flat of the table. Overnight, it dries and forms skin, sheer and light like silk.

She stops throwing up the lichen, but she feels her blood beating in her temples and into her fingertips whenever she eats it.

After a while, she discovers the panel on a wall. She lifts David’s head from the table and brings him before it so he can read it. He tells her which keys to press and, the next week, the lichen has started to grow fruits, round, as big as a fat orange. Inside, it’s bread-like and tastes like lemony dirt.

With David’s help, she learns some of their keys and words, then sentences.

Then, she goes to sit down in the pilot’s seat and learns to pilot, David’s head on the console to guide her. The ship is as eerily silent as the planet. She wonders if they had music at all, or any enjoyment of anything.

 

 

In the darkness of the ship, she starts recalling things that she thought she had forgotten. Her childhood is of the utmost clarity. She tells him of it. It is strange to hear it from her mouth, and very different from seeing it through her eyes. But they both know that.

“Perhaps, when there is sufficient idleness of the mind, does it start to reach into its own depths, if only to distract itself from, well, nothingness,” David comments.

“How would you distract yourself?” she asks.

The android quirks an eyebrow. His face is still ashen and damaged. “I have memories as well, more extent than yours.”

“But no wish for one of them specifically,” she points out, softly peeling the glimmering skin from the table where it has dried. “None of loss, none of love.”

“How would I know the difference exactly between loss and love?” David asks.

Elizabeth smiles. “Now, whose mind is idle?” she chides.

There is warmth in David’s neck and torso. It’s alarming at first, like badly routed information. And then it puzzles him when he realizes that his body is still in the bag, crumpled at the foot of the wall, on the other side of the room. He stares up at Shaw. She’s still smiling, while focusing on attaching the skin to his neck, where it will grow chords and more neuroids.

He smiles and he doesn’t know where it comes from. He wonder if that is freedom, or will.

 

 

Once his head has been reattached, things go astonishingly fast.

Shaw sleeps on the bridge, curled against the wall near the pilot seat. She has made herself a nest with softer materials gathered on other decks, clothing perhaps. Her head is pillowed on a softly beaming roll of cloth.

He is afraid for a moment that he’ll surprise her. His step is clumsy and the neuroids visible in the deep gash of his neck pulsate in the darkness.

She wakes up with a quiet gasp. “David,” she says.

He kneels by her. “Yes,” he says.

“You’re walking,” she says. Then she hugs him. She holds on very tight. The warmth is back along with the knowledge that it had never left.

“How do I feel?” he asks.

“Alive,” she says. She doesn’t let go for a while and when she does, she doesn’t look at him for some time.

 

 

They haven’t managed to leave the distant orbit of LV-223.

Shaw looks down at the surface from a monitor that gives it a green-blueish rendering. “There’s nothing there,” she says.

“No animals, no sounds, no feelings,” David echoes. “Only death, a formidable and perfect death. It’s beautiful.”

“It’s lonely.”

David tilts his head. “Does loneliness seem warm to you?”

Shaw huffs. “No. It’s pretty cold.”

 

 

It grows and David thinks he knows what it is now. It reshapes him faster than he could think it possible. At some point, he thinks there is a poetry to it, and that the new skin has changed some of the neuroids too. But that’s not it, he tells himself. And that’s new too – he can lie to himself – and cling to it.

David stays with her when she eats. He cuts the fruits for her. “Do you think I’m free?” he asks.

She looks up and her eyebrow takes on a particular curve. David knows this curve. “No,” she says. “But neither am I. I was created too, remember? By the pricks that wanted to destroy us.”

“Maybe you were a disappointment.”

Her face hardens. “You think this a lot.”

“If not, you would have destroyed them. When finding them.”

She gets up from the table and prepares to leave the room, her plate of sliced bread-fruits in hand. Her cheeks are pink with tense anger, the same one he feels. “I love you,” he says. And she freezes.

“What?” Her voice has a tone David has never heard before.

“It is a strange feeling. I’ve been trying to understand it for some time.” He still sits at the table. “It grew from gratitude,” he remembers aloud. “And my imaginary collection of the different shapes of your smile.”

Elizabeth leaves the room.

 

 

They haven’t spoken much. But she doesn’t seem angry. They have managed to leave orbit and are approaching the next system. The coordinates of the Engineers’ home world are mapped in the ship’s navigation drives, but Shaw isn’t sure this is where they are in fact going. David works on it.

“I want you, as well,” he offers over one meal, sometime later.

She doesn’t react as strongly as last time, but frowns in curiosity. “ _Want me_ want me?”

The warmth erupts in his chest, and he thinks he might be experiencing some sheepishness. “The… details are abstract, I admit. Informative rather than efficient,” he says. “But if I could hold onto you and never let go, I would.”

“Provided I would let you.”

He nods to the side. He is not sure he had thought about it this way. But it is true that it seems better. “Would you?”

Shaw thinks for a moment. “I’m not sure.”

In David’s chest, the warmth climbs to proportions so high that it is indescribable. There is a phoenix, he thinks, about to burst out of him, monstrous in drippings of golden sunlight.

 

 

“You could show me,” he says the next day.

Elizabeth has just woken up and, as every day, David waits for her, sitting a few feet away from her bedding, against the wall. “I’m still not sure.”

The words are themselves warm as they come out of his mouth. Yet they sound the same. “Is there any way that you could become certain?”

Sleep has not left her face yet, and David has learned to know that too. At this moment, he sees through it. “Something has changed in you. It hasn’t changed in me,” she says. “You wanting me doesn’t change anything, David. You’re not the world.”

He searches for an answer, but he leaves after a whole minute of silence.

 

 

He is on one of the lower decks. A console in the wall has revealed some holographic files. He is reading through them when she finds him. “Are you okay?” she says, quietly.

“Yes,” he says.

“You love me. I don’t love you,” she says. “Typically, that’s not okay.”

“It’s not okay, but I will be,” he corrects. “This feeling manifested mechanically. It grew with my new flesh and it made me feel new. I will undo it just as mechanically. I will alter the memories, repel the patterns in thought. Crush it until it has no air to breathe and nowhere to go. Destruction through reorganization.”

She listens patiently and seems hurt by some of what he said. He has mostly not lied. “I think I found that we’re on the right course,” she says. “Do you want to check with me?”

He says, “Of course.”

On their way to the navigation room – Elizabeth’s room – he tells her what he was reading. The story of a king or a leader whose tale began with the destruction of all he knew and possessed. He was bare in the world, entirely alone, for so much time that he thought he had destroyed the day and the night as well. He forgot what had caused the destruction that had brought him there. At some point, he managed to thrive again, and nurtured new forms of life. It’s only when he destroyed them again that he understood he himself had caused the first destruction. “From what I gathered of their rhetoric and style, it’s a happy tale,” he says.

Elizabeth says, “Fuck’em.”

 

 

They are indeed on course. Elizabeth decides to go into hypersleep. David reconfigures it for her, so that it will give her enough air, enough energy. That the warmth isn’t gone, is what is most surprising, altogether. It’s different, yes. Greater, stronger. It has lost its anchor and it rampages around him. He spends nights and days trying to set it in some order.

“Can I record you?” he asks.

She smiles. They have returned to smiles, and the warmth has become a spear again. “Why?”

“You will die and I will have nothing, but my want. I would like something. An image, or a sound would be enough.”

She pauses. “I thought that was over. The wanting,” she says. “Crush, mechanics, reorganize. All that.”

“Oh, it did,” he says, reassurance, warmth, unfolding, enveloping. “It just… crystallized into something else.”

Elizabeth nods slowly. “I’m sorry,” she says.

“Don’t be. A feeling cannot be a disappointment,” he says. “I learned that.”

She seems to think about that, and when he wonders if she still remembers his request, she says, “The John Denver song I like, would that be alright?”

 

 

2.

 

Dr. O’Connell walks in. The new android has started to absorb water. Internal sensors report that self-maintenance and minerals extraction are proceeding normally. “Has he named himself?” she asks the technician.

“Yes. Walter,” Tricia says.

“Oh good. Still dissyllabic.”

“Yep.”

Walter lifts his head up from the water bottle. “Monosyllabic names tend to remind humans of first-generation cyborgs, for which these names were chosen to seem more familiar. More than two-syllables, on the other hand, will cause an impression of detachment,” he explains.

Dr. O’Connell smiles. Slowly, Walter mimics it in detail, down to the curvature of her lips and the hint of her lower teeth. “That’s great,” she says. “Pleased to meet you, Walter. Your eyes are open a tad too wide.”

“My apologies,” he says. He stops smiling and adjusts his eyelids.

“No need. We’ll look over the details with you in behavioral refinement.”

Tricia takes Walter’s left arm and connects him to the main monitor. “I can’t wait,” Walter says, eyes on his arm. In the blueish hue emanating from the sensory stimulation walls, his gray skin looks ashen compared to Tricia’s darker one. But he would learn to adjust that too.

“Have we got any trace of emotional pathways forming in the neuroids?” she asks Tricia.

Tricia wrinkles her nose. “Some. But we can’t really avoid it. The vocabulary is missing from the language, so there won’t be any damage done.”

“I apologize, but I don’t understand this,” Walter says.

“Humans experience emotions. Artificial intelligence, like you, does as well. But our regulatory systems can’t manage to contain them properly,” O’Connell tells him. “So it was simpler to remove the vocabulary for them from your code and your programs-…”

“Which doesn’t stop me from interacting with humans and understanding their emotions. But it does stop me from understanding my own, thus decreasing the risk of corruption of the behavioral pathways,” he finishes, when he finally finds the information in his archived memory. “Without the proper words, feelings will all seem like small glitches.”

O’Connell gives an apologetic smile. “We still hope to find a way to set this straight.”

“Don’t worry. No offense taken,” Walter says.

 

 

 3.

 

There are so many little things that Jacob owned that Daniels thought she didn’t recall, or didn’t even know. But when she touches them now, it’s like the memories flare with flames, and all comes back in a rushed flood. It starts at the Indian restaurant in Toronto, when they were still training, and it ends at her eyelids that burn with tears. It starts at the time his mother couldn’t quite understand why her first name would end with an s, and it ends in her fingertips shaking.

“Are you okay?” Walter says. It startles her somewhat, but she recovers quickly, in part because she knows she cannot hide her reddened eyes and quaking lip.

Walter repeats his question, but doesn’t walk in. Daniels stays by Jacob’s bed, kneeling. “I…” she starts. “No. I don’t know. Yes. I will be.”

“Grief is tricky,” Walter says, politely.

Daniels blinks and wipes her cheeks. “What?”

“Grief. It can be difficult to deal with for androids.”

She frowns. “Androids don’t have it.”

“To deal with it in humans, I mean.” He steps inside, sits on the bed, on Jacob’s bed, and Daniels feels anger rising and rising. But it’s going nowhere, because it has nowhere to go, and Jacob is gone. “I have to make sure that you can perform your duties adequately. But now if I say it like that, you might yell at me.”

The burst of laugh that comes from her chest surprises her. She is still crying too. “I might,” she agrees.

“And I do know what grief is. What remains and manifests after the loss of a loved one. Incarnated in popular culture in ghosts,” Walter lists. “The sudden removal of a source of meaning greater than meaning can be given to.”

His tone is clinical, but so purposefully detached that it makes her smile again. “I might still punch you.”

Walter archs an eyebrow in what seems like a shrug. “You actually can, if you’d like. I don’t mind.”

She has stopped crying now. She gets to her feet and sits beside him on the bed. “Why are you here?”

The android looks at the scattered belongings of the dead Captain. “Prolonged exposure to memories during the earliest stage of grief is corollary of an increased risk of severe depression occurring in the next six weeks. I suggest you take a break.”

Daniels tilts her head back and looks at the ceiling until her eyes hurt. Walter stays with her until she gets up and leaves.

 

 

She excuses herself and leaves the bridge during a meeting. The other crew members’ voices are too much because Jacob’s is missing. The terraforming bay seems like a good place. She runs checks, tightens covers and reviews inventories until her mind is empty. Walter finds her as she is leaning over a monitor, waiting for a report to come to screen. At that moment, she also begins to hope that she will find some sleep, one day.

She knows the rhythm of his step, more regular than any of theirs, much softer. “Please don’t ask me if I’m okay.”

Walter blinks and stares at her. “You’re not okay.”

She shakes her head, dives her fingers into her short hair. “I have to be.”

He takes the seat next to hers and stares at the blinking cursor with her. The loading bar is filling up slowly with white. “I realize there are limits to the comfort and understanding I can offer,” he says.

“You don’t have to understand. I suppose I feel like no one really does,” she says. “Especially right now.”

“I can simulate empathy, in fact. But the parameters are extremely strict. I never found a situation where I had to use it.”

Daniels looks away from the screen and at the android. His face is almost entirely expressionless. There is a hint of a smile, but she has no idea if it is meant to be there. “A situation when? I thought this crew was your only assignment, and we’ve barely been awake a few hours.”

Walter’s face shows some interest, but it remains too dim. “Oh, it is part of the programming not to volunteer that information to the crew we are currently serving with. If the crew believes I am assigned only to them, they are more likely to invest in their emotional bond with me.”

Daniels sits back. “Then why are you telling me?”

Walter turns to her. The white bar has filled and the changes she made to short-circuit a weak node in the ventilation of the exploration truck can be applied. The glow of the screen catches the whites of his eyes. “Because it distracts you,” he says. “The same reason why I diminished my affect, so as not to demand emotional involvement on your part. I am truly sorry if it seems manipulative.”

The screen is asking her for confirmation to proceed. “It does seem manipulative,” she says. “But at least we both know that.”

She confirms the surge. A moment lapses. The computer reports the weak node has been neutralized. “I really want to help,” Walter says.

Daniels is suddenly very tired, and it feels so good. “I believe you,” she says quietly.

 

 

Walter finds her after she storms out on Oram. Her concerns will be in the log, he said. And of course, there could end up being no log, because no ship.

“Do you truly believe we are at risk?”

Her anger feels deeper and starker for the loss of Jacob, she knows, but that doesn’t make it better. “You know I’m right. We have to check for pathogens, microbic lifeforms, possible parasites. Not to mention the animal life that the standards may not have picked up,” she lists. “Speaking of which, we also need to recalibrate the sensors. We should have found this planet.”

Walter stands opposite her in the corridor between B-60 and B-62. The lights are on because they detect her body heat, but it is off in both of the other sections on either side of them, enclosing them in a casket of light. “There may have been a malfunction. Or are you thinking something else?”

She bites her lip and shakes her head. “I’m thinking if this planet were suited for us, we would have found it.”

“That the sensors were deliberately calibrated to avoid picking it up?”

She nods. “We controlled some of the parameters. But our research was based on Weyland-Yutany’s maps. Entire systems were written out of those.” She looks back at Walter. “At least, while I’m angry, I’m not sad.”

Walter tilts his head. “You’re still sad.”

“Why are you doing this?” she asks.

“It’s what I do.”

“Talking things out with me?”

“Being of service, in whatever way I can be needed. In ways that exceed human capacities, physical or intellectual, while being mindful not to show these excesses, nor to aim at imitating humans too closely.”

“You think that servitude includes friendliness? It’s a sad thought.”

Walter looks out on his left, where a light blinks to indicate a communication from Mother. “I have to remind you that it’s only simulated,” he says, some distance to his voice. “I’m just, so to speak, doing the motions.”

“It’s strange to have you say that,” she says. She doesn’t perceive it as manipulative anymore. Manipulation would hide its true aim. Walter is candid in a way she feels is almost hurtful. He cannot feel it for himself, she knows. But she is starting to think that he can feel it in her.

“Does it help?” Walter asks. “The talking.”

Grief, all teeth and fangs, returns to rapture her as she sets her mind on it again. “Yes.” Her eyes are brimming with tears. “Yes, it does.”

Walter reaches for a small pocket in his uniform and pulls out a tiny handkerchief for her, then nods and goes to the console to see what Mother wants.

 

 

They are about to launch. The landing team is assembling. Daniels should join them, but for now, she stays in Jacob’s room. Their room.

She has poured herself a glass of whisky, and she should not drink it, so she holds it clasped between her hands. The tears are silent. She just wonders when she stopped thinking of it as their room, their bed, their life. And started to think of it as his room, his bed, his life. Yet she cannot sleep, or stay here. It hurts too much.

Two soft knocks on the doorframe. “Come in,” she says.

Walter walks in. “Cargo loading is complete. One of the cooling circuits had to be repaired,” he lists. “Captain Oram is ready to depart. Officer Faris and Sergeant Hallett wanted me to check on you.”

Daniels smiles up at him, shakes her head. “I’m not broken,” she says.

“They don’t think you are.”

She reaches for the bottle and pours another glass. “Yes, they do. Oram especially.”

The android looks at the glass she offers him. Then at their surroundings. “Should I sit with you?” he asks.

“Sure.”

Daniels touches their glasses, then drinks hers down. Walter watches her, then drinks from his own glass, his face remaining expressionless. “You should be asking me if it burns,” he says.

She frowns. “I know it doesn’t burn. Your circuits will extract some things from it, the rest will be excreted in powdered form through the membrane of your skin,” she says. Walter looks at her with a strange face, that seems like awe, or surprise. “And you’ve done it again.” She takes both their glasses and places them down. Tennessee’s Jack is almost done. “Reminding me you’re not my friend.”

“You like that,” Walter says.

“I do. Do you like that I like it?”

The room around them is mostly bare now. Jacob’s belongings are in boxes that Daniels wonders when she will next open. Nonetheless, the android runs his eyes around the cabin, as if searching for an answer. “I suppose it’s a good approximation to say I’m indifferent,” he finally says.

Daniels shakes her head. “That’s not what I meant.”

Walter turns to her and seems to examine her face, with a slight frown. Daniels can see the gears turning, but she would see them in anyone, she figures. “I would die for you,” Walter says then. “If we encounter unforeseen complications on the planet, it’s likely that I will. If I don’t, you will die first while I will not age.”

“And you’ll stay with me. Why me?”

“It’s my duty.” Walter smiles a polite apology. “I know it sounds heartless.”

Daniels shakes her head. “No. You have a duty to everyone on this crew. Maggie, Lope, all of us. Why single me out? Why am I special?”

Walter doesn’t need to think about it. “You seem in need of friendliness.”

Daniels huffs. “What if I become your friend? What if I like you?”

Walter lowers his eyes then. His hands have been motionless in his lap. He doesn’t mimic relaxation and appears stiff, but Daniels likes that he doesn’t imitate humanness as much as he used to with her. “I don’t know exactly,” he says. “But part of my programming is meant to escape me: it’s for spontaneity. So that I can be surprised when I learn, and in return learn from that surprise.”

“What has surprised you lately?”

“You.”

“What in me?”

Walter’s eyes go blank as he examines something inside. “I can’t say. Just you.”

 

 

They are by the fire in David’s home. Home seems like an improper word. Daniels hasn’t asked if the bodies outside are the hollowed ones of dead people, or if they are some kind of statues, meant to represent some long-dead gods.

She watches Walter inspecting his severed hand. “How long until it grows back?” she asks.

“I am uncertain. This acidic component is unknown to me. I’m still analyzing it.”

She pushes a twisted branch deeper into the fire. “I wish I could regrow parts. Regrow Jacob. Regrow Maggie.”

Walter looks up. “That’s impossible,” he says. “You’re not missing parts. You are in fact whole.”

She smiles at the fire. When she turns around, she finds Walter smiling down at his wrist.

 

 

The time elapsed is unknown. The neuroids in the back of his neck were too damaged by the knife.

It is still in his neck, where David left it after the third stab.

Among the first neuroidal pathway that comes back is the need to care for Daniels. Walter suspects that it has become something else. He doesn’t know when it began, but now he can think this is because of the damage to the core neuroids.

Before he can even begin to move, he starts to self-repair. He calls to Daniels’ image, in order to attempt and remember.

It doesn’t help.

 

 


End file.
